Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I contemplated waiting a little bit to post this, since I clearly JUST blogged about the bridesmaid dress, but what the heck.

First of all, I must report. Since I measured myself for this pattern, I've dropped two dress sizes. Yes, yes, I can hear you all saying "QUIT WHINING ABOUT LOSING WEIGHT!!!!!" I'm not necessarily whining about that, but what I am whining about is that my cut dress no longer fit!!! I suppose it's better than if I GAINED two dress sizes, but when I put the finished dress on I was somewhat bummed out.

That, on top of all the first-timer mistakes, made me less-than-confident to wear this dress to the wedding.

But nobody noticed anything and it was just fine!! I probably won't have time to change the imperfections about it before the July 4th wedding I'm going to, but I don't care. I'm very happy that I was able to do this!!

I'll start with some pictures of the finished product (I'm sorry about the horizontal-ness... not sure how to fix that):

Man, I just love looking at that yellow fabric. It's probably the prettiest yellow fabric I have ever seen.

And then I might show you what the back looked like. Whoops.

That was a zipper issue. And I really have no idea how to rememdy this one. I cut the pattern the way they said, and I can make the pieces fit together, but for some reason installing the zipper set it off SIGNIFICANTLY.

Speaking of the zipper, I picked an invisible one. Why? I enjoy self-torture. That's the only reason I can come up with for wanting to do double the work.

Since Bernina wants $45 for an invisible zipper foot, I pulled out my mom's Singer from circa 1965. Isn't it a beaut?

This sewing machine is the marathon runner of sewing machines. It's the one I learned on, and I'll tell you, it works just as nicely as my three-year-old baby.

Here's a picture of the way the dress looks from the back. Fortunately, the zipper crookedness is less apparent here:

You can really tell how poorly the dress fits from this angle. That neckline is supposed to hug my neck, not droop down like that. PS - check out my new haircut! Do you want to know how I fixed that? I'll keep it real for you... I folded the shoulder seams over and ran a straight stitch right over them. I kind of felt like a pageant mom fixing my kid's dress at the very last minute with safety pins.

The neckline (not shown) was also troublesome, and I didn't have enough fabric for an even hem all around. So shoulders, neckline, zipper, hem... there were problems all over the place.

And you know what? I'm the only one who noticed any of them!! I rate that... SUCCESS!!

All in all, I'd give myself a C+ on this dress. I've definitely found a new part of sewing that I like, but I'm very relieved to go back to quilting and needlepoint for a while :).

Except when I see things like this. Then I want to make clothes all day long.